Those
are some of the words that have been used to describe
a report by the Police Ombudsman of Northern Ireland,
Nuala O’Loan, which shows that there was
collusion between Special Branch officers of the
then Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) and members
of the loyalist outfit the Ulster Volunteer Force.
O’Loan’s report focuses on north Belfast
in the 1980s and 90s, when a gang of UVF gunmen
carried out 10 murders, 10 attempted murders,
10 punishment shootings, 13 punishment attacks,
a bomb attack in Monaghan and 72 other criminal
offences while simultaneously working as informers
for Special Branch. Some were being paid £80,000
a year, and if ever arrested by the RUC they were
‘babysat’ through their interviews
by their Special Branch handlers to help them
avoid incriminating themselves.
The report might make for ‘disturbing’
reading, but it isn’t ‘shocking’
to some of us. It is well known, at least among
those of us who looked beyond the headlines during
the conflict in Northern Ireland from 1969 to
1994, that the security services colluded with
loyalist paramilitaries. Some of the families
of those murdered by loyalists have been demanding
inquiries into collusion for ages. In the Eighties
and Nineties, the two predecessor publications
to spiked - the weekly newspaper the
next step and the monthly magazine Living
Marxism - frequently reported on acts of collusion
in their Irish coverage. Yet back then, nobody
wanted to talk about it, much less employ a police
ombudsman to investigate the claims and write
a shocking and disturbing and extraordinary report.
What has changed? Why has collusion become an
explosive issue 10 to 20 years after the fact?
This is less about getting to the truth about
the conflict in Northern Ireland, or ‘bringing
to justice’ those who were involved in terrorising
certain communities. The collusion revelations
are better understood as therapy for the British
state. They’re a way for British elements
to admit to some wrongdoing in Northern Ireland
without incriminating themselves (with Nuala O’Loan
playing the ‘babysitting’ role in
this instance), where the ultimate aim is to placate
Sinn Fein and others and get the peace process
back on track. Collusion is being upfronted in
an attempt to boost the British authorities’
flagging moral authority in Northern Ireland,
rather than to shoot it down.
Writing in the Guardian, Beatrix Campbell
gushes that ‘Nuala O’Loan is a heroine’
and tells us not to ‘underestimate the moral
courage of this fastidious lawyer’ (1).
In fact, O’Loan’s report is partial
and narrow, and certainly nothing like a detailed
exposé of collusion between the security
forces and loyalists. By focusing on north Belfast
alone, and the role of Special Branch in paying
and protecting a UVF gang, O’Loan reinforces
the idea that collusion was rare and generally
the work of ‘rogue elements’ in an
otherwise benign and peacekeeping security force
in Northern Ireland. In truth, collusion was widespread.
And far from being an aberration, the actions
of loyalist paramilitaries – consisting
mostly of sectarian attacks on Catholics and occasionally
targeted assassinations of Sinn Fein and IRA members
– were part and parcel of Britain’s
occupation of Northern Ireland.
Collusion in Northern Ireland took many forms,
from the security services turning a blind eye
to loyalist activities to actively encouraging
and directing them. A military intelligence file
from 1973 estimated that between five and 15 per
cent of soldiers in the Ulster Defence Regiment
– a local infantry regiment of the British
Army – were linked to loyalist paramilitaries,
and that the ‘best single source of weapons,
and only significant source of modern weapons
for Protestant groups, has been the UDR’
(2). In short, a section
of the British Army was arming loyalist paramilitaries.
Furthermore, the British government knew that
more than 200 weapons had passed from the UDR
to loyalist paramilitaries, and that these were
being used to murder Catholic civilians (3).
The loyalist paramilitary group the Ulster Defence
Association (UDA) received intelligence files
on Irish republicans, and on Catholic civilians
who assisted Irish republicans, from the RUC and
the British Army. During the conflict, loyalist
paramilitaries killed 864 civilians, the vast
majority of them Catholics (this is more than
the number of civilians killed by the IRA, who,
unlike the loyalists, targeted security forces
rather than members of the public). The UDA killed
a total of 112 people, again mostly Catholic civilians
in random shootings (78 of its victims were civilians,
29 were other loyalist paramilitaries, three were
members of the security services, and just two
were republican activists). As Peter Taylor shows
in his book Loyalists, a number of these
attacks were carried out with ‘the assistance
or complicity’ of the British Army and/or
the RUC (4).
Indeed, one of the most notorious instances of
collusion involved the UDA. In February 1989,
gunmen from the UDA and its offshoot group the
Ulster Freedom Fighters broke into the Belfast
home of defence lawyer Pat Finucane and shot him
14 times in front of his wife and children. A
UDA quartermaster who was also working for the
RUC supplied the weapons, and it is widely believed
that Special Branch officers directed the paramilitaries
to kill Finucane, who had represented IRA men
in court cases. Another UDA/army double agent,
Brian Nelson, had compiled a dossier for the UDA
on Finucane’s movements. The Stevens Inquiry
into collusion, which ran in stages in the 1990s
through to 2003, showed that the ‘UDA had
access to a large number of security files on
republicans’, including Finucane’s
(5).
One of the most public expressions of collusion
occurred in 1974 during the strike of the Ulster
Workers Council (UWC). The strike was called by
loyalist groups in protest at the Sunningdale
Agreement, which proposed that nationalists should
be given a role in a power-sharing government
in Northern Ireland. The British Army refused
to break the strike, implicitly expressing its
support for the strikers and their aim; this act
of collusion caused the collapse of the power-sharing
Northern Ireland Executive.
Beyond this arming and direction of loyalist paramilitaries,
there was also a kind of day-to-day complicity
between the security forces and loyalists. For
example, many of the families of those who were
killed by loyalists asked how gunmen in cars could
drive into Catholic areas in Northern Ireland
(areas often surrounded by heavily fortified security
roadblocks and monitored 24/7 by army and police
cameras), shoot up some civilians and then just
drive off again. Even the Shankill Butchers, the
most barbaric loyalist gang, seemed to benefit
from a ‘blind eye’ policy on the part
of the security forces. The Butchers murdered
19 people in the early and mid-Seventies. They
kidnapped Catholic civilians in a black taxi and
took them to lock-up garages, where they would
suspend them from ropes and use a knife on their
naked bodies ‘much in the manner a sculptor
would chip away at a piece of wood or stone’
(6). One of their victims
had 147 stab wounds. Another was heard to say,
after hours of sadistic torture, ‘Please
kill me’. As Martin Dillon points out in
his 1989 book The Shankill Butchers: A Case
Study in Mass Murder, this all took place
in areas of ‘dense army/RUC activity’
where the antics of the Butchers were widely known
about and discussed; and the Butchers did not
even make much effort to hide their activities,
instead following the same routine almost every
time they went out and ‘boasting about their
murders’ (7). Yet
it wasn’t until 1979 that some of
the Butchers were put on trial.
From arming loyalist paramilitaries to directly
encouraging UDA gunmen to target republican sympathisers
to turning a blind eye to the sadistic torture
and random murder of Catholics, collusion between
the security forces and loyalists in Northern
Ireland ran deep. Loyalist paramilitaries were
effectively allies of British Army intelligence
and the RUC, who viewed them as useful attack
dogs in the war on Irish republicans and in terrorising
and morally deflating Catholic/republican areas.
At the same time, there were tensions between
the British security forces and loyalists. The
British pretty much held loyalists in contempt,
and would rather not have worked with them at
all. And of course, the authorities would arrest
and imprison loyalist paramilitaries for periods
of time, which helped to bolster the idea that
Britain was a neutral arbiter in a ‘tit-for-tat’
conflict between two sets of mad Irishmen –
loyalists on one side, and republicans on the
other. In fact, as the evidence of collusion shows,
the conflict was between the forces of the British
state and their loyalist allies on one side, and
republicans on the other.
Much of the welcoming coverage of Nuala O’Loan’s
report on incidences of collusion in north Belfast
has got loyalist paramilitarism completely the
wrong way around. The assumption is that it was
the security forces’ unthinking hooking-up
with loyalists that drove the conflict.
In other words, the bloodlust of groups like the
UVF and the UDA was the driving force behind the
violence in Northern Ireland, and Britain should
have known better than to rub shoulders with such
murderous charlatans. As Beatrix Campbell says,
‘the state sponsored death squads for years
in Northern Ireland and this collusion prolonged
the war’ (8). In fact,
these loyalist death squads were an offshoot of
Britain’s war against the IRA and its occupation
of Northern Ireland, not the other way round.
The loyalists were merely allies – sometimes
useful, oftentimes not – in a far larger
military occupation by the British Army and local
army and police outfits.
That is one reason why claims of collusion were
vigorously suppressed in the past. Ms O’Loan
may today be a ‘heroine’ for reporting
on certain instances of collusion, and Guardian
journalists may now slate the British authorities
for ‘sponsoring death squads’. But
where were these people 15 and 20 years ago, when
collusion was taking place and Catholic and republican
families were trying to make it a big issue? Back
then, talking about collusion could land you in
trouble. In 1991 Channel 4’s Dispatches
team made a programme revealing the extent of
collusion between loyalist paramilitaries and
RUC members; their researcher was arrested in
a dawn raid and charged under anti-terrorist legislation
with withholding information and Channel 4 received
a hefty fine. In January 1990, as the Stevens
team in Belfast made plans to arrest Brian Nelson
and others working as army/loyalist double agents,
their HQ was destroyed by a fire; all the fire
alarms and heat-sensitive intruder alarms had
been disconnected first. This gave Nelson time
to flee Northern Ireland. It is widely thought
that the fire was started by elements within the
British Army (9).
How did we go from claims of collusion being met
with censorship and fire to a situation where
the police ombudsman can talk about it to the
cheering of various journalists?
This is a product of the fallout from the conflict
in Northern Ireland, and also part of an attempt
by the British authorities to regain some moral
highground there. Debate or disagreements about
issues such as collusion were suppressed during
the ‘Troubles’, because, as in any
conflict, differences of opinion that army majors,
judges, soldiers, politicians or police ombudsmen
might have had about military tactics would have
been settled behind closed doors. The threat posed
by the IRA to the stability of the United Kingdom
forced the British establishment to close ranks
against its common enemy, and to settle problems
in private. That is why Northern Ireland was the
one issue that enjoyed bipartisan agreement in
parliament. From the authorities’ point
of view, it would have been unthinkable to have,
or to allow, a political debate about underhand
tactics such as collusion. And if that meant censoring
annoying critics, and even threatening and attacking
official inquiries, so be it.
It was the end of the conflict in 1994 –
in the absence of the common enemy of the IRA,
who at least reminded the British authorities
what they were all against – that led to
serious cracks in the establishment over Northern
Ireland. With the winding down of the conflict,
debates that once would have taken place in private
emerged into the public arena. The Stevens team
restarted its inquiry into collusion in 1993,
just as the peace process was emerging –
and the inquiry into the events of Bloody Sunday,
when 14 unarmed protesters were shot by the British
Army in Derry in 1972, commenced in 1997 (and
is still ongoing, unbelievably). These very public
spats over the army, police’s and politicians’
roles in some of the most controversial actions
of the British state over the past 40 years are
an indicator of how hard the authorities find
holding the line these days.
Such issues have also become a kind of therapy
for the British state. Government ministers use
issues such as Bloody Sunday and collusion as
a way of confessing that, yes, bad things were
done in the past, but now we must all move on
together. The timing of the collusion revelations,
for example, are striking. They come just as the
British government is trying to convince everybody,
especially Sinn Fein, to accept the new Police
Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI); Sinn Fein
is holding a crucial special conference on policing
this coming weekend, at which President Gerry
Adams will try to convince the membership to back
the new PSNI. What better way to prove that the
police have changed than by hanging out to dry
a handful of those ‘rogue elements’
from the past? In one fell swoop, the authorities
manage to make the wrongdoings of yesterday’s
conflict look like the work of small groups of
bent coppers, while coaxing today’s various
parties to sign up to the peace process and accept
Britain’s new ‘consensual’ agenda
for Northern Ireland – an agenda which,
as we have pointed out on spiked before,
seeks to stifle genuine political debate and argument
(see Northern
Ireland’s war of words, by Brendan O’Neill).
The end result is a shallow debate about the past,
where questions about who was really responsible
for the conflict and violence are evaded, and
an uncritical approach to the new issues thrown
up today. Just as collusion in the past was a
product of Britain’s undemocratic rule in
Northern Ireland, so the revelations of collusion
today are being used to solidify Britain’s
new forms of government and policing without any
difficult questions or critical thinking.
Visit
Brendan O’Neill’s website here.
